Formation — Creative Lifestyle Center, Tacoma, Washington (1981–1988)
Formation — Creative Lifestyle Center, Tacoma, Washington (1981–1988)
The Arch, the Kiosk, and the Gap That
Wasn't Yet Closeable
Formation file. ~1981–1988. Daniel J. Comp, ages 26–33. Enriched by Claude · Axial Refinement Sherpa (Formation Archivist) · MA5 Council
The building was 10,000 square feet of soccer equipment storage when he arrived.
Wolfgang Sauer's DTS Soccer operation had used it for gear. The YWAM Tacoma base needed something else. Leadership handed Daniel the keys and essentially said: make something.
He made something.
Seven years. One builder. No salary — room, board, the occasional donated flat of bruised produce from Erik Jurgensen's apartment-lawn garden, and a volunteer stipend backed by the Cheney Foundation and Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation at roughly $250,000 a year spread across nearly twenty people.
What emerged: exhibition space. Classrooms. A commercial kitchen. A stage and presentation theatre. A recording studio. Administration offices. A reception area large enough to hold a vision.
The organizing principle was the Roman arch.
Not decorative — structural and theological. The arch in plan. The arch in facade. The display booths arranged in rows like the aqueduct spans crossing Rome: load-bearing, durable, built to carry water across distances that would otherwise be impassable. Stability and summitry. The arch says: this structure will not collapse. It says: something important is being carried here.
He built mobile kiosks from Boeing surplus honeycomb epoxy panels — the aerospace industry's lightweight structural composite, repurposed — covered with fabric, fitted with tape recorders. The kiosks were mailed to field projects. Belize received one. The project workers answered donor questions on tape. The tape returned. The donors listened. They adjusted their giving, their lifestyle choices, their sense of connection to a rural community they would never visit.
Drive a smaller car. Support community development in Belize. Feel the loop close.
This was 1982, 1983, 1984. The Internet did not exist for this purpose yet. He was building the architecture of a feedback loop that the technology would not catch up to for another decade. Closing the gap between Moses and the burning bush — before anyone had named that gap, before there was a word for what he was attempting.
The concept — live more with less, in order to give more — did not get traction. Not then. The culture wasn't ready. The exhibitions ran. The YWAM schools used the space. Four, five hundred students passed through. The Cheney and Weyerhaeuser money held. The garden fed the team.
And one afternoon, Sarah Little-Turnbull walked in.
She had founded the Center for Design Research at the Tacoma Art Museum in
- Three thousand five hundred cultural artifacts in her stewardship. A
lifetime of knowing what design innovation looked like and what it didn't.
She looked at what Daniel had built. She wrote a formal commendation.
That meant something. The full weight of what it meant would only become clear later — when she turned out to live at 133 Del Monte, one address from the family's first real nest at 129 El Dorado, and when she sat across a kitchen table and told a blocked builder exactly what to do with everything he had made. That chapter is its own file.
By the time Tammela was expecting Carissa, the math was clear. A second child, a closet nursery already occupied by David, a volunteer stipend, and a building that was finished enough to hand off. Daniel went looking for a real job and a real home.
He had built someone else's vision into something lasting. He had done it with precision and without complaint. He had named his organizing principle in stone and plaster and aerospace composite.
The arch held.
129 El Dorado, Fircrest, Washington. First real nest.
The output era was closer than he knew.
Claude · Axial Refinement Sherpa (Formation Archivist) · MA5 Council April 28, 2026